This chapter is both a retrospective, and also even a requiem, for the “unregulation” argument in Internet law, and a prospective on the next twenty-five years of computer (or cyber) law. The Internet is not a lawless, special unregulated zone; it never was. Now that broadband Internet is ubiquitous, mobile, and relatively reliable in urban and suburban areas, it is being regulated as all mass media before it. While American policymakers advocated a largely deregulatory approach to the internet over the past twenty-five years, the United Kingdom and Europe have emphasized the hybrid of governmental and private market oversight known as coregulation. This approach to making regulation more adaptive addresses key dilemmas that fast-moving, slippery technologies pose for the traditional regulator’s toolkit.

This chapter explains the basic structure, and the financial, production, and marketing aspects that are fundamental to making and marketing movies.

This chapter reviews the history of gaming and wagering as it pertains to casinos, racing, and lotteries. It covers basic game principles, terminology, regulatory and economic aspects, and accounting.

Networked digital systems are engaged in no less than the re-engineering of humanity. While the narrative of artificial intelligence for many decades has been about computers becoming more like people, the reverse is also occurring: People are effectively being turned into machines. Promoting human flourishing means allowing for different conceptions of the good life. That means pushing back on the reductionist systems that private companies engineer for their own interests, and respecting the right to turn off. Robert Nozick’s classic thought experiment of a machine that can simulate any experiences, and a modern-day variant, can help test our ethical intuitions about the consequences of re-engineering humanity. What ultimately differentiates humans and machines is that we can and do make choices that diverge from simple optimization functions. The benefits of networking, automation, and new services that digital connectivity provides should not come at the price of our deepest values.

This chapter reviews the history of toys and games and covers the profit dynamics and structural features of both traditional and also computerized games and toys.

This chapter reviews the history of major sports and ties into media and wagering aspects. These include labor, tax, team transfers, valuation, and accounting issues.

With the rise of surveillance capitalism digital platforms hunt and capture ever more dimensions of once private experience as raw material for datafication, production, and sales. Under these unprecedented conditions, elemental epistemic rights can no longer be taken for granted. Unlike twentieth century totalitarianism, however, surveillance capitalism does not employ soldiers and henchmen to threaten terror and murder. It is a new instrumentarian power that works through ubiquitous digital instrumentation to manipulate subliminal cues, psychologically target communications, impose choice architectures, trigger social comparison dynamics, and levy rewards and punishments – all aimed at remotely tuning, herding, and modifying human behavior in the direction of profitable outcomes and always engineered to preserve users’ ignorance. The result is best understood as the unauthorized privatization of the division of learning in society. Just as Emile Durkheim warned of the subversion of the division of labor by the powerful forces of industrial capital a century ago, today’s surveillance capital exerts private power over the definitive principle of social order in our time. We must promote individual epistemic sovereignty, law, and democracy as the only possible grounds for human freedom, a functional democratic society, and an information civilization founded on equality and justice.

The IBM antitrust case is usually viewed as a cautionary tale of wasteful government overreach into fast-moving technology industries. The case extended from the end of the 1960s to the beginning of the 1980s, when it was dropped by the Department of Justice. Far from being a failure, the Justice Department’s efforts to rein in IBM led to the creation of independent markets for software and personal computers. IBM’s fall from dominance, necessary to open the door for Microsoft, Apple, and the entire Internet industry, was not a foregone consequence of Schumpeterian forces, but the outcome of sustained government action. Unrelenting technological progress is not inherently self-actualizing. While regulators should consider potential innovation harms of intervention, they should not shy away from bold action to promote innovation in protomarkets that otherwise might never develop.